They say that a pilot earns their paycheck every tenth landing. The theory: the plane mostly flies itself when everything goes well*. When you need to do something more complex – like, say, fly into ORD mid-derecho, as I’ve had the unfortunate fate of experiencing – then that’s where your expertise kicks in.
I have had the good fortune of earning my paycheck this past month, for all of my clients, for reasons both obvious and not obvious. One client watched a vendor turn usurious with a day to go in the contract; another lost a key staff member; a third shared with me a big, intractable problem around onboarding. In each of these, we flew into the storm, stuck the landing.
The common thread is advisory, brought about through establishing the expert position ahead of time. Expertise can be publicized in the form of whitepapers, process documents, surveys, books, and reports. Most of you know we’re experts in what we do, but many others, including some who hire us(!), need a little budging.
Because what we do is value-based design, but how we create value is through advisory. It doesn’t take long for people to start asking us bigger strategic questions that, on face, have nothing to do with the actual practice. But they have everything to do with the way the business works, and there’s always something deeper to explore.
Expertise is established & reinforced through the ability to devise systems around the patterns that occur in an industry. Applied to our work, our experience in working with software businesses for two decades allows us to say “oh, yeah, we’ve seen that before, X & Y happens as a result” materially every time we notice something. This, in turn, allows us to work alongside those in power to co-create strategic direction. We’re trusted as outsiders who can also immediately deduce the problems at hand.
And so we teach for a few reasons:
- To establish & reinforce our expert position.
- To create more value-based designers. We want more people to practice value-based design. We don’t view them as competitors. In fact, we think it’s vital to the future of our profession that people practice value-based design. Our industry lost sight of who our customers are and what they want. Value-based design restores this relationship.
- To occasionally reposition the business, as we’re doing now with our focus on software.
While the tech industry has its fair share of problems right now, I’m lucky & deeply grateful that our industry still venerates people thinking in public, sharing what they know, and hoping others benefit. That’s why I write, with consistency – so eventually, I can be trusted to stick the landing when it really matters.